The story behind Farmed Carbon

The mission of Farmed Carbon is to remove 1 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Stuart and David previously worked together building and scaling one of Australia’s leading FinTech companies.  They sold this business to a FTSE100 company in late 2021 so they could focus their attention on their passion of trying to build a company that can make a meaningful difference to climate change.

The first step was to found Climate Tech Labs – an ideas lab to identify and research different concepts.  Assisted by Dylan Albrecht and Chris Mullen, numerous different solutions ranging from ocean afforestation to home automation were analysed.  The criteria: the solution had to be commercially viable and it had to be capable of having a real and meaningful emissions reduction impact.

Eventually, pyrolysis was the technology decided upon.  Pyrolysis involves heating an organic substance to a relatively high temperature in the absence of oxygen.  The process ends with very stable forms of permanently sequestered carbon. 

Pyrolysis is an old process dating back thousands of years.  However, no one has yet been able to develop a mobile pyrolysis machine that can work at scale.  The mobility of the machine is key as globally there are around 5-10 billion tonnes p.a. of agricultural waste that is either burnt or left to decompose.  This releases billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.  It is not physically or commercially viable to transport this waste to fixed plant, hence a mobile plant is required to travel to the farm to process the waste.  This is what Farmed Carbon is developing; the world’s first commercially viable mobile pyrolysis machine.
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The first target crop is rice.  This was chosen given rice is a staple food for two thirds of the world’s population, it is the second most prevalent crop on the planet and yet over 95% of the post-harvest straw waste is burnt. ​

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